I Blame the World

“Being an adult is fuckin’ hard,” sings Sasha Alex Sloan on the guitar-fueled “Adult”, one of many disenchanted anthems that bolster the singer/songwriter’s nihilistic alt-pop manifesto <i>I Blame The World</i>. Relatability is one of Sloan’s natural gifts as a songwriter—and that’s why artists like Camila Cabello, Charlie Puth and Katy Perry have turned to her talents—but she reserves her most brutally honest confessions for herself. The “glass-half-empty kinda girl”—as she proclaims on the pulsating title track—unleashes all the cynicism she’s collected over her first 27 years and packages it into tidy synth-lined sing-alongs for the misanthrope. “I don’t want to live my best life,” she confesses on the mopey, minimalist ballad “Live Laugh Love”, her voice soft and airy yet half-detached, as if she’s cooing lullabies to her greatest enemy—which may just be herself (see the deceptively jaunty “I h8 Myself”). Still, there are a few rays of hope in Sloan’s blackened world. Even when coolly singing of Earth’s demise on breezy electro-pop groover “Global Warming”, she still admits that love is the best way to forget about it all.